So people* ask me “Now look here, son, you were the biggest foe of Verizon imaginable six or seven years ago. How come all of a sudden you’re angling to get on with them and ditch AT&T?” Well, there’s a very good reason – things have changed. Three things, actually, and I will enumerate them as follows:
1) HARDWARE LOCK-IN. At the time that I wanted nothing to do with Verizon, there were THREE (3) GSM carriers in this country, and an unlocked phone gave you the promise of moving between AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile more or less at will since almost all phones had 850 and 1900 Mhz capability. Fast-forward to the present day, and there are only two GSM carriers, using different frequency bands for 3G coverage – AT&T in the 850/1900 space and T-Mobile solely in 1700 Mhz. And there is only one phone in the world that I know for a fact has the ability to do 3G in both bands – the GSM Galaxy Nexus, which is not available in this country.
So at this point, SIM locking is a formality for going abroad – you have absolutely no portability between US carriers anymore unless you’re willing to use your phone at the hottest speeds of 2006 on whatever is the “other” carrier between AT&T and T-Mobile. And at that point, you may as well pick whoever you can live with for two years.
2) APPLE. The iPhone is unique among American mobile phones in that it shows no marks of the carrier – there is no branding (you will never see an AT&T or Verizon logo etched on an iPhone), there are no carrier apps that can’t be uninstalled, there is no standard carrier UI (like Verizon was forcing onto all their regular phones four years ago), and the carrier has absolutely no sway over what gets installed (there is no locking out Bluetooth, as Verizon famously did with the Moto V710, or anything like Verizon’s neutering of Google Wallet on the Nexus Galaxy). The iPhone device experience is the same on any carrier – which means at that point, you’re down to…
3) THE NETWORK. Verizon’s network was never optimized for data coverage. Most of their “largest nationwide network” was still relying on analog footprint for a very long time, and the EV-DO-based 3G famously doesn’t allow for simultaneous voice and data transmission. And in fact, to all analysis, the top speed on EVDO is slower than the top speed on WCDMA/UMTS-based 3G (a la AT&T).
But.
AT&T has simply failed to keep up with the network buildout required to support the world’s most popular phone. To this day, there is still a spot on the Mountain View-Palo Alto border that is a completely dead zone for AT&T. Their network is famously unusable at Cal football games (where AT&T is a corporate sponsor of Golden Bear athletics). The situation in San Francisco (and to all accounts New York) is tragicomic in the extreme – it is a cliche of modern life in the city that you will not be able to get a signal on your iPhone in any meaningful way.
Meanwhile, Verizon has turned over most of their analog coverage and has maintained a superior network in the Bay Area – and more to the point, is rolling out the same LTE-based 4G as AT&T but faster and farther. It’s safe to assume that if a 4G iPhone does appear, it will be more viable faster on the Verizon network than on AT&T. And in the meantime, Verizon still tops customer satisfaction posts for network performance in the Bay Area.
So there you have it. Things changed – and in many cases not for the better, certainly not for the consumer – and the aggregation of those changes has turned Verizon into the preferred instrument going forward. If the iPad 3 is indeed interoperable between GSM and CDMA, such that it could be used here on Verizon and abroad on GSM, that’s absolutely going to be the chosen route. (After all, it doesn’t matter if I can’t talk on my iPad, does it?)
Besides, Verizon Wireless is the official wireless provider of the Vanderbilt Commodores…
* Nobody asks me this, except the wife, and I think she’s just going for the zing. ;]
TOTally going for the zing.